by Max Boot
Obviously the ardor between Ed and Pat had cooled a bit, but real passion still remained in a romance that had commenced ten years earlier, in 1946, when he had spotted a good-looking war widow in a white dress sitting in Johnny Orendain’s car. Back then, Ed was thirty-eight years old and Pat thirty-one; now he was forty-eight and she forty-one. Their relationship had been intellectually as well as emotionally fulfilling; the canny Filipina had played a critical role in helping her American lover to better understand the dynamics of Southeast Asian societies. But with Ed leaving Asia and heading back to Washington, while still refusing to divorce his wife, their relationship had reached a critical turning point.
Already Pat had let Ed know that she was dating other men, news that earned her a jealous rebuke from a boyfriend who, to judge by the extant evidence, did not dally with other women, his wife of course excepted. “OK, so you wanted to hurt me,” Ed wrote to her. “It hurts. Why? The guy isn’t worth even the little finger of someone like you, even if he is a good dancer. . . . What in hell is amusing about seeing someone you are in love with following anything new in pants? And people who are poseurs?”8 Ed continued to tell Pat that he needed “his real woman, you.”9
Then, on September 7, 1956, knowing that Ed was about to return to his family in Washington, Pat sat down at her typewriter and wrote him a letter full of pain and longing that deserves to be quoted at length for the light it sheds on the state of their relationship:
I am having an extremely difficult time trying to say the right things. What does one write when one wants to terminate 10 years of a wonderful association? Does one merely scribble “finis” and let it go at that? Or does one merely keep silent and thus let it be understood that everything is all over. This would have been the easiest thing to do . . . just like running away and hiding and refusing to face facts. It would have been very cowardly too.
I think what we have or had, deserves something better than that. It is so hard to give you up without a struggle which I suspect you are ready to do.
The years go by, people change and the things they want are different. I wish I could just keep on feeling the same old way, happy to compromise, blind to almost everything except to be with you, to love you and have you love me, to be content after some fashion. But things have changed. I feel I must keep faith with myself. I have reached a bridge and it has to be crossed.
I am no longer contented with just knowing you love me and being with you now and then. I want more. I want to have the right to be with you for always, to have security and peace and happiness. You need me too. You will be needing more as time goes on, when there will be no more countries to save, no more wars to be won, no more troubles to shoot. Without us together, your life will just be one long, continuous work—empty in the end. There won’t be anyone to nag you or tease you or jump you or tell you what a stinker you are getting to be.
My fight isn’t against your work or your devotion to it. (I remember, though, that one of your real friends did say that you put so much in your work because you have nothing else in this world to look forward to. I remember too how this saddens me.) My fight is against what you think is your moral obligations to your wife and children. You seem to have forgotten a moral obligation to yourself too, and to both of us.
Years ago, there was no doubt your family had first claim on you. But things are changed now. You have given your family (people who see you once or maybe twice a year) all that is due them—the prestige and protection of your name, a social standing in the community due to your position, and all the material comforts they need. They have enjoyed all these things while you were thousands of miles away from them, not just for a few days but for a number of years! Obviously they can get along fine without you. They can’t miss you very much anymore.
So why should you feel you should still belong to them? So why should you feel they need you except for the things you have afforded them? Which you can keep on giving them for the rest of your life! . . .
Also, we . . . Asian women are coming into our own. We want our rightful position which the democratic world has promised us. Years and years ago, a mixed marriage would have demean[ed] both parties but with the world as it is today it would not only be morally right but also politically and psychologically. . . .
You aren’t putting in practice the principle of being fair, which I am told is the American standard of life. . . .
Anyway let’s save us both some face and start life anew in our separate way. I can’t go on the same old way and still retain respect for either of us.
It has been a wonderful ten years, and if I had a choice, I won’t change any little bit of it. It has been wonderful knowing you and I hope we will continue to be friends after a while. Right now, I hope you will keep away from me and stop writing. (Did I ever tell you you write the most wonderful drunken letters?)
So long.
This letter is still painful, even for a biographer, to read, after all those years; it must have been unimaginably difficult to digest for its intended recipient, a man still very much in love with his Patching.
In fact, Ed and Pat would not sever all contact. They would continue to correspond infrequently. Their meetings became more infrequent still—once every few years. But the most intense relationship of Lansdale’s life was, for the time being, over, along with the central purpose of his life—to fight for freedom on the ground in Asia. In the immortal words of Elvis, since Ed’s “baby left” him, he was taking “a walk down lonely street to Heartbreak Hotel.”10 Now he would have to find what solace he could in the bosom of a family that, as Pat noted, he had barely seen during the past decade.
PAT KELLY was not the only close friend in the Philippines from whom Lansdale was now separated.
Since his inauguration, Ramon Magsaysay had lived up to the hopes of Lansdale and his other American backers by becoming a staunch supporter of American foreign policy in Asia. Once Lansdale left the Philippines in 1954, however, Magsaysay fell under the influence of established politicos and failed to enact reforms to clean up Philippine politics or to correct the economic inequities that generated so much resentment. While Magsaysay maintained his own reputation for probity, he “became lazy and was manipulated,”11 Lansdale later acknowledged, and Lansdale’s periodic trips to Manila between 1954 and 1956 were not enough to get him back on track. When he did see Lansdale, Magsaysay complained, in Ed’s words, that “he didn’t have any Americans he could trust anymore.”12
By early 1957, as Lansdale was adjusting to life back in America, Magsaysay was gearing up for a reelection campaign in which, despite the disappointments of his first term, he would be the prohibitive favorite. On March 16, 1957, he flew to Cebu, one of the most densely populated islands in the archipelago and one of considerable historical importance as the place where in 1521 Magellan had converted the first Filipinos to Christianity. Arriving at 4 p.m., he was greeted by a rapturous throng at the airport and proceeded through a long afternoon and evening of speeches and meetings. By the time he finally reached Lahug Airport again, located in a hilly section of Cebu City not far from downtown, it was past midnight. The former president Sergio Osmena Sr., who had waded ashore alongside Douglas MacArthur at Leyte Gulf in 1944, was waiting to see him off, despite his advanced age (he was nearly eighty years old). He urged Magsaysay to spend the night at his house and fly back to Manila in the daylight. But the president said he had too much to do. Finally, at 1:15 a.m. on March 17, the presidential airplane, a twin-motor C-47, dubbed Mount Pinatubo after a volcanic mountain where the president had hidden in his guerrilla days, took off in the early morning moonlight. At the controls for the three-hour flight back to Manila was the Philippine air force chief of staff, Brigadier General Benito Ebuen. Ten minutes after takeoff, he radioed “ceiling unlimited.” Then there was only silence, a silence that grew increasingly ominous with the passage of time.
As morning dawned in Manila, wild rumors circulated. Some said Magsaysay had made an unsch
eduled stop. Others said that the plane had crashed but the president had survived. An all-out search by air and sea was mounted, with U.S. ships and aircraft joining in. The plane’s wreckage was finally found late in the day on March 17 amid the dense jungles of Mount Manunggal, a six-thousand-foot peak located twenty-two miles north of Cebu City. There was only one survivor—a Filipino newsman who had not been wearing his seatbelt and was thrown clear of the crash with severe burns. He said that the plane had exploded just twenty minutes after takeoff. Sabotage was initially suspected, but responsibility was later affixed on pilot error aggravated by a failure of the lighting system. In the dark, General Ebuen, whose flight experience was in fighters not passenger aircraft, failed to clear the top of the mountain. Twenty-five bodies were found, most of them charred beyond recognition. One of the president’s brothers had to identify his blackened corpse from a wristwatch.13
When the president’s family heard the devastating news, his oldest daughter threw her rosary across the room—a shocking act in a devoutly Catholic family—and exclaimed, “There is no God!”14 A radio announcer sobbed when he broke the news of the death of this young and vibrant leader, not yet fifty years old, whose passing was as much of a shock to Filipinos as the assassination of John F. Kennedy would be to Americans nearly seven years later. His funeral proceedings in Manila five days later would last seven hours and be mobbed by hundreds of thousands of weeping and screaming men, women, and children.15
Lansdale got the news in Washington in a phone call from one of Magsaysay’s aides, “his voice so choked with tears that I barely understood his words.” This was Lansdale’s third successive heartbreak. He passed along the news to Carlos Romulo, the prominent soldier, politician, and journalist who was serving as Philippine ambassador to Washington, and the two men “sat together for hours trying to console each other.”16 A few days later, Lansdale noted, “The RM business really hurt. Still am not used to losing such friends.”17
In tribute to Monching’s memory, Lansdale persuaded two of the Rockefeller brothers—Nelson Rockefeller, who was about to embark on a campaign for governor of New York, and his older brother, John D. Rockefeller III, founder of the Asia Society among other philanthropic endeavors—to fund a Magsaysay Award Foundation, which would give out prizes for “public-spirited government service” in Asia. (Lansdale also mentioned the good work being done by Operation Brotherhood in Laos; Nelson wrote a check for $15,000 on the spot.)18 Nearly sixty years later, the Magsaysay Award Foundation still hands out beneficial awards.
Lansdale had less success in persuading the CIA to back a successor in Magsaysay’s mold. He “quietly” pushed for the CIA to support Manuel Manahan in the 1957 election.19 Manny was a former newspaper publisher who had worked closely with Lansdale to elect Magsaysay and had subsequently served as head of the Presidential Complaints and Action Commission and as commissioner of customs. In the latter position, he had cleaned up a notoriously corrupt government agency. But Lansdale’s old nemesis George Aurell, now CIA station chief in Manila, refused to throw CIA resources behind Manahan, who was running on the Progressive Party ticket. Aurell preferred the Liberal Party, because he had a “deep-cover agent” close to its vice presidential candidate,20 thus putting the imperatives of American intelligence gathering over the dictates of good government in the Philippines. While the CIA sat on the sidelines, the Progressive and Liberal candidates split enough votes between them to allow the election to be won by Magsaysay’s vice president, Carlos Garcia, a Nacionalista ward heeler who had been given the job as part of their price for supporting Magsaysay. “Garcia hadn’t been in office six months,” a CIA officer stationed in Manila later wrote, “before false bills of lading became standard at the Manila harbor, copra was being smuggled out of the southern islands in huge amounts, and a payoff system was put into effect for conducting any sort of transaction with the government.”21
Everything that Lansdale and Magsaysay had strived to achieve by making the government more honest and accountable was unraveling. In 1962, five years after Magsaysay’s death, Lansdale lamented that “the end result of corruption and mal-administration has been the frittering away of the Philippine military establishment to a hollow shell . . . , the lowering of public morale to a point where there is little of political value worth a Filipino’s life to defend, and an increase of vulnerabilities inviting illegal overthrow of the government.”22 Just three years after he wrote those words, Ferdinand Marcos would be inaugurated as president.
The post-1953 tribulations of the Philippines showed how difficult it was to fundamentally transform a country, any country, whose social and political contours had been shaped by myriad factors over the course of a long history, like rocks formed by the accumulation of sediment over the millennia. Lansdale could accelerate and guide political change in the short term. Making that change last was a much more difficult proposition, mainly because of indigenous resistance but also because of resistance within the U.S. government. Before long Lansdale would have cause to learn that lesson anew in Vietnam.
19
Guerrilla Guru
The strongest control is one that is self-imposed; it is based on mutual trust and the awakening of unselfish patriotism on ideals or principles we ourselves cherish.
—EDWARD LANSDALE
BY the time that Edward Lansdale returned home to Eisenhower’s America at the end of 1956, he had a firmly established reputation inside the U.S. government not only as the country’s most successful political warrior but also as an inveterate maverick at odds with whichever bureaucracy he happened to find himself in. Lansdale had been fighting with his bosses since his days in San Francisco advertising. He operated best on his own, or at most leading a small team, and he constantly vented his frustrations with the workings of the U.S. government. Referring to visiting “American psywar people,” he wrote in 1956, “One of the really amazing things is some of them actually talk Washington gobbledygook as normal conversational language! It surprised some of my gang, so I told them that such people were not too certain of themselves and so covered up their lack of certainty or depth by talking in a way that sounds profound but is impossible to analyze.”1 Given his contempt for bureaucrats, it was not easy for Lansdale, once he left Vietnam, to find a niche in what he referred to as “the Washington jungle”2 or, alternatively, “the squirrel cage of Washington.”3
Senior executives at the CIA, from Allen Dulles on down, told Lansdale that he was welcome to work in their headquarters, still located in temporary buildings along the Washington Mall.4 There was some talk of sending Lansdale to Egypt to work with Gamal Abdel Nasser, but Lansdale put a stop to that by pointing out “how the Quai d’Orsay [the French Foreign Ministry] would react,” given his feuding with the French in Indochina.5 No other job was forthcoming from the CIA. “My present shop simply didn’t come through with anything concrete, except that they loved me,” Lansdale wrote to his old deputy, Charles “Bo” Bohannan. “I told them I loved them too, and let it go at that.”6
Protestations of mutual affection notwithstanding, it was hardly a surprise that the CIA was not all that eager to find headquarters employment for Lansdale and that he was not that eager to press for a job there. Lansdale had had heated and continuing clashes with many of the career intelligence officers at the CIA, most recently over whether the agency would support Ngo Dinh Nhu’s pro-government political parties. Ed wrote in 1957 to Bohannan that George Aurell (“Big George”), the CIA station chief in Manila, regarded both of them “with undying hatred,” and was reportedly “getting drunk at cocktail parties, receptions, etc.,” naming them “as Company,” and “sounding off to all and sundry that there is [a] new era now, without the bribery that we did.”7
This was not just a clash of personalities but also a difference of ideas about how the CIA should operate. The mainstream view at the spy agency held then, and still does, that the job of a case officer is to create “formal, controlled agent relationships”—t
hat is, to pay or blackmail foreigners into spying on their countries.8 Lansdale was willing to give funding to his friends in the Philippines or Vietnam to help them accomplish certain tasks, whether to publish a pro-Magsaysay newspaper or to lure sect troops over to Diem’s side, but he did not believe in creating formal reporting relationships with agents. In his Saigon Military Mission report, Lansdale went out of his way to express his dissent from CIA orthodoxy: “There is a lesson here for everyone concerned with ‘control’ of foreign persons and groups. The strongest control is one that is self-imposed; it is based on mutual trust and the awakening of unselfish patriotism on ideals or principles we ourselves cherish. Once established, the foreign person or groups serve our own best national interests by serving their own national interests, which coincide with ours.”9 This view was anathema at the CIA, where cynical intelligence officers viewed it as hopelessly naïve.
Lansdale was hardly the first or last covert operative to run up against this prejudice. So did, among others, Robert Ames, the CIA’s premier Middle East case officer in the 1970s and 1980s. Ames established an invaluable friendship with the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Ali Hassan Salameh, who served as an informal American conduit to the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Yet, as the historian Kai Bird has shown, CIA colleagues repeatedly sabotaged the relationship and almost drove Salameh away by demanding, over Ames’s protests, that he sign a contract to become a controlled agency asset—something that he refused to do.10